


my heart is jumpin' (it's easy to see)

by womanaction



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: F/M, episode rewrite, fluffy tropey goodness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-05
Updated: 2017-05-05
Packaged: 2018-10-28 10:26:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10829382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/womanaction/pseuds/womanaction
Summary: Shippy rewrite of 4x8 "Herstory of Dance." Shirley doesn't get involved in Abed's blind date, but for some reason Annie still isn't happy.





	my heart is jumpin' (it's easy to see)

**Author's Note:**

> *fills a swimming pool with shipping tropes, swan dives into it*

He tunes back in and Annie is saying something about a blind date.

Normally, he’s always watching. Always listening. But this year isn’t normal. Something feels different – maybe the group’s imminent separation from each other.

She’ll leave, of course. Pursue her dreams. Well. Her goals. Annie can have her head in the clouds, he thinks, like him. But she’s deeply practical.

She’s stopped talking. She’s looking at him expectantly. Her eyes are very large and very blue, and for just a second he wishes his talents lay in prose instead of film. He could find a better way to describe that color, that Annie-blue. Cerulean?

Nah. Too cliché.

“Blind date,” he says, parroting back her last few words. He’s been told that makes people feel listened to. He almost always listens to Annie. It’s not her fault that today – this week – this year is different. “Cool. Cool cool cool.”

She makes that little squealing noise, the one that’s so quintessentially Annie. When he was making _Community College Chronicles_ he could never get fake!Annie to do it right. At the time, he hadn’t been sure why it bothered him so much. He thinks he maybe knows now, if it has anything to do with the way his stomach vaguely jolts as she wraps her hands around his arm and swears that he won’t regret it. That it’ll be the “best blind date ever,” and he smiles almost automatically as she lets her hand drop down to meet his. Their hands dangle there in the air for a minute, not quite connected, not quite apart.

How’s that for a metaphor?

* * *

 Annie doesn’t do things by halves and she doesn’t do things without thinking about them first, and that’s why she’s convinced that Operation: Blind Date (better name pending) is the best plan ever.

It’s not like she thinks one blind date will fundamentally change who Abed is as a person or anything. That’s naïve freshman year Annie logic, not world-wise senior year Annie. Besides, she kinda likes him the way he is, cheesy as it sounds. She likes the way his eyes light up for just a second when he encounters a new character or trope to live out, and she likes the way he hums around the apartment when he’s setting something up or making buttered noodles or just existing in the same space as her. Most of all she likes the way he watches her, attuned to her reactions and somehow always finding her interesting. This is crazy, but sometimes she could swear he gets more out of watching her watch Cougar Town than watching it himself.

When it’s a rerun, at least.

But as much as she would write “don’t ever change” in his imaginary yearbook (when she asked about that, the Dean just shuddered and said never again, which is really too bad because she didn’t have any friends in high school to sign hers except her ex-boyfriend, who wrote what she’s pretty sure were Madonna lyrics, even if she thought it was a little romantic at the time), she worries about him. Especially the last few months. It’s better now that Troy is back, of course, but now that he’s with Britta there’s a lot of just “Annie and Abed nights.” And honestly, that bothers her less than it probably should. They always have a good time together, and sometimes she thinks if they could stay in that bubble forever that would be fine. No graduation, no marriage, no real jobs or real life.

But that isn’t going to happen, upcoming Winger speeches about the permanence of friendships notwithstanding. Reality is going to come knocking at Apartment 303’s door and she’s going to make sure they’re all ready for it. And if that means kickstarting Abed’s “growth arc,” well, what are friends for? 

* * *

Annie fusses over him, of course. He’s trying to run the simulations less but he didn’t need a Dreamatorium to predict that she would throw herself into this blind date operation as much as she did anything else.

He doesn’t really mind. It feels a little _Can’t Buy Me Love_ or _Drive Me Crazy_ to have her clicking her tongue critically at his different outfits. When she runs her fingers through his hair in an attempt to fix it, he shivers. He tries to refocus his attention to framing the scene but he can’t, because any possible narrative with a scene like that would necessarily include him as a love interest for her. Maybe not a successful one, he reflects, thinking _Pretty in Pink_.

He isn’t going to consider the popular opinion of that movie’s ending.

She beams at him when her work is finished. Lately he’s been wishing more and more that he could capture every moment like this. He’s considered setting up a webcam and filming everything their senior year just to have it, but that would make his character even more distant and unlikeable. Like _Scream 4._

He settles for miming a camera. “Click.”

Against all odds, Annie’s glow intensifies. They stand there for a second, her face still captured in his imaginary frame. He isn’t sure how long is appropriate for this moment to last and he’s not sure he could make himself move if he did know. She finally breaks his gaze and tugs his hand down. “Come on, we have to show you off to your date,” she says. There’s something in her voice he isn’t sure how to identify, but he lets her pull him along.

* * *

“I think he’ll really like her,” she hears herself saying again. She’s oddly nervous. Not that it’s odd for her to be nervous, but it isn’t _her_ blind date. She didn’t ask anyone herself. Jeff was busy mocking the whole concept of the Sophie B. Hawkins dance, so he wouldn’t have been any fun, and besides, she’d been too busy getting Abed ready for his date.

Shirley, beside her, just gives her a look and says, “Mm-hmm.” It’s not her deep, completely doubtful “mm-hmm,” but it’s not the bright, cheery, agreeable one either. Annie, feeling somehow affronted, turns to ask her what that’s supposed to mean but she’s already slipped back into the high-pitched tone as she tells her to “have fun, An-nie.”

“I will!” she says, a little belated and still feeling oddly offended. Shirley’s acting like she knows something Annie doesn’t, which isn’t something she enjoys. She likes knowing things! That’s kind of her whole deal. She thinks maybe that’s why she’s enjoying this forensics class so much; it’s basically all about finding things out and helping people. Two things she’s pretty darn good at. Speaking of…

She pouts for a second, then catches Abed’s eye across the cafeteria. She looks next to him. No Kat. “Oh, no, you don’t,” she mutters under her breath, sprinting over.

“Abed!” she exclaims brightly, but with a clear undertone of warning. She can’t tell if the nuance is lost on him. “Where’s Kat?”

He points to where the quirky girl is engaged in conversation with another girl who appears to be wearing a dress made of candy wrappers. “Met another Manic Pixie Dream Girl. It seemed like an appropriate interval to offer to go get a drink for her.”

“Oh,” she says, deflating a little. “Well…good. So it’s going well?”

Abed shrugs. After a second, he gives her a quick, fake smile. “I should get back.”

She stands there as he walks off, feeling strangely lost. She should be proud of herself that her plan is working so well. She tangles her hands together as she watches him hand Kat her drink, the picture-perfect gentleman he’d no doubt learned to play from Old Hollywood.

Something isn’t right. 

* * *

Abed’s not having a bad time, even if Kat is aggressively quirky. He was just starting to make headway talking to her about Zooey Deschanel when she got distracted by a hula hoop. But he can cross “bad blind date” off of his list, and he gets to play the put-upon nice guy genuinely trying to make it work.

His heart isn’t really in it, though. He thinks it has something to do with the way Annie’s face fell earlier. It’s like he let her down somehow. He remembers her empathy lessons and frowns.

Maybe he should ask her directly. She told him before that she wouldn’t get mad at him if he had to ask what he’d done wrong, and besides, she doesn’t seem mad. Just disappointed, which is somehow much worse. But he’d gone along with all of her plans, let her dress him up like a paper doll. She’d seemed to enjoy that. It was only after that she started acting strangely.

She’s sitting by herself, apparently lost in her thoughts. She looks very pretty tonight. He wonders why she went to so much effort when she didn’t ask anybody to the dance. If it’s for Jeff’s benefit, it was probably a waste of her time. He’s attracted to her, of course, but he’s distracted tonight. She’d said before that she didn’t love Jeff, but that seems to be the most plausible explanation for her behavior. He doesn’t have time to run the whole simulation.

“Kat?” he says, somehow unable to take his eyes off Annie. Her chin is propped on one arm in the universal sign of lonely daydreaming. “I need to – ”

Oh. She’s gone.

* * *

 “Annie?”

His voice shakes her back to reality, although she’s not really sure where she was before. Somewhere in her mind, trying to figure out why things felt so off. This is more pressing, though. “Abed! Did something go wrong?” She searches his face for a clue.

“I was going to ask you the same thing. You look lonely.” He takes the seat next to her and she suddenly becomes very aware that the table had been completely empty.

She’s a little embarrassed at how obvious she must have been. “Just lost in my thoughts,” she says lightly, trying to play it off.

He gives her that brief quirk of a smile, but his eyes stay warm and fond after his mouth returns to its regular blank position. “I think I know something about that.”

For some reason, his worry is only making her feel worse. “You should get back to your date. Don’t you like her?”

“Not really,” he says mildly. “I think she was supposed to teach me a lesson about missing out of life by making myself an observer, but that’s an essential part of my character arc, anyway. I only went along with it to make you happy, but then you didn’t seem to be happy so there was no point in continuing the façade. Did I do something wrong?”

“No!” she exclaims immediately, reaching for his hand. “No, it’s – I don’t know what it is. But it’s not your fault.”

“Is it about Jeff?”

Her brow furrows. “No,” she answers honestly. She’d barely seen Jeff tonight, and she really hadn’t thought about him much.

Abed continues to study her silently. Their hands are resting intertwined on the table. She looks at their hands and her breath catches. Maybe she does know what’s wrong, she just doesn’t want to admit it.

She didn’t want the date to go well. She wanted to be able to fix it because she likes to be needed. She wants him to need her, the way that…

“Annie?”

She looks up guiltily.

* * *

He’d been watching her as he mentally ran through his database of situations. Not his knowledge drawn from real-life interactions, he’d already searched there. No good. Movie tropes would have to do.

She was sad and alone at a dance. She had set up one of her friends to go on a blind date, which seemed to make her feel worse, but she showed no signs of pining after the object of her affections.

He didn’t think Annie had been aware of it, but she had smiled when he told her he didn’t like Kat. That he’d gone along with it for her sake. And that meant…

His thoughts seem to freeze. He’d run the simulations and this event had appeared so vastly improbable he’d deemed it functionally impossible and moved on. He tries to catch her eye, but she seems zoned out, staring at where their hands are joined on the table.

“Annie?”

Her expression when she looks up makes him feel more certain. He’s had a lot of practice identifying her faces, picking out the individual emotions. Anxious. Content. Romantic. Embarrassed.

“Matchmaker Crush,” he says, mostly to himself.

She frowns, but before she has a chance to ask what he means, he’s kissing her.

Annie’s more tentative than she was when they kissed as Han and Leia, possibly because they’re in public and it is unambiguously romantic. It takes a few seconds, but her hands reach up to his hair that she’d styled so carefully and she lets out a little sigh into his mouth. It’s one of the best sounds he’s ever heard.

When they break apart, he’s completely out of breath. He just looks at her for a second. A pretty, excited blush is coloring her cheeks. “What did you say right before?” she asks in a whisper, obviously still out of breath herself.

 “Matchmaker Crush,” he informs her, unable to stop his eyes from dropping to her lips as she bites them. “When setting up the love interest with another character is the catalyst for the main character to realize their feelings.”

“Oh. Like in _Drive Me Crazy._ ”

He isn’t sure how to express in words how happy that response makes him, so he just kisses her again instead.


End file.
